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  • Why our schools are broken – and how to fix them

    Almost all of what you’ll read in the new, just off the press,  education issue of the Brooklyn-based newspaper, The Indypendent, (“a free newspaper for a free people”) contradicts the narrative of school failure and reform you read and hear in the press and media. To understand the push for charter schools, privatization, and the standardized testing mania, as well as why teacher unions count, read the just-published issue, in paper or online. Warning – it’s a big file that takes a bit to load. But the wait is worth it. 

    John Tarleton’s two-page map of the global trajectory of neoliberal reforms is especially helpful in seeing the big picture. And in great to hear parents and students expose inequalities in the NYC schools – and describe how they are being combatted. Stanley Aronowitz’s article rightly reminds us that education has to be about human emancipation. Yes! (Note to  Stanley: The education major was eliminated long-ago. Now the struggle is to have teachers prepared for more than five weeks.)

    Here’s hoping that education activists in NYC  get out the word about  this powerful and empowering journalistic project. Many thanks to the Indypendent for this contribution to international resistance to neoliberalism’s destruction of public education.

  • Getting rid of bad teachers

    As a parent who sent my child to New York City public schools, as a former teacher myself, I’ve seen my share of bad teachers. Great, good, mediocre, and awful teachers exist in every school. The same range of job performance describes the lawyers, doctors, customer service representatives – you name it – I deal with on a daily basis.

    So what explains this hysteria, and it is a hysteria, about bad teachers? To start, we have “macro” factors I describe on Democracy Now.  But there’s a viciousness to the attacks on teachers that can’t be explained solely by economics. Gender is at work here too, a deep hostility to women and the  nurturing typically associated with “women’s work,” which teaching is of course.  (About 85% of all K-12 teachers are women. ) Neoliberalism has no use for  the life of the mind or nurturing because these activities do not produce profit, and in neoliberalism’s ideological universe, nothing counts but profit and Darwinian competition.

    This viciousness towards teachers is once again in the news, literally, in Los Angeles. The LA Times has created an online database of elementary school teachers, by name and published ratings for them based on their students’ standardized test scores. To understand the utter ludicriousness of this new system used to rate teachers, called “value added,”  imagine if doctors were rated on their patients’ health nine months after treatment began. The rating system had no controls for what patients did outside of the office, no controls for their health when they commenced treatment. Then newspapers published doctors’ names and ratings? Teachers who are named can post responses. One I found especially moving was written by William Torres.

    United Teachers of Los Angeles, the teachers union,  has organized a demonstration, Sept.14, 4:30 – 6:00 p.m. at the LA Times Building in downtown LA. The union calls the LA Times action “teacher bashing.” I think it’s something more as well – getting back at mom.

  • Teachers' jobs, paid for by cuts to food stamps – a victory?

    The House of Representatives has passed a $26 billion jobs bill, engineered by Democrats, that is aimed to save jobs of public employees, mainly teachers and help states pay for Medicaid health insurance. Funding will come from taxes on multinational corporations– and from slashing money for food stamps. Congressional Republicans lament that this is a “giveaway” to teachers unions. (The Republicans demand, instead, that we give taxpayer money to the wealthy and the transnational corporations. We expect this from Republicans, no?)
    Of course the bill is giving money to schools and kids, not the unions. It’s not a lot of money when you consider that the budget of the NYC schools alone was over $1 billion last year. But it will help stave off disaster. Students in districts serving poor and working class families will probably be spared obscenely large classes of 40, 50 and more. The law is also a “giveaway” to tens of thousands of kids in more affluent school districts, who are losing “frills” that are a distant memory in urban schools: art, gym, music, sports, after-school programs. The Democrats protest that they included the cut to food stamps to get Republican votes and that they will win the food stamp funding back…somehow. But the real story is that liberal Democrats collapsed in their efforts to make the party support jobs AND foodstamps, as TheHill.com reports:
    “House Democratic leaders had resisted earlier suggestions by the Obama administration to redirect food-stamp money to the jobs bill. The White House had noted that the 13.6 percent stimulus increase in food stamps was initially designed to last until 2014. It was going to last until 2018 because of unexpectedly low food prices during the recession.
    “Their line of argument was, well, the cost of food relative to what we thought it would be has come down, so people on food stamps are getting a pretty good deal in comparison to what we thought they were going to get,” House Appropriations Chairman David Obey (D-Wis.) said in a Fiscal Times interview last month.”
    The Democratic Party makes no mention of the food stamp cuts. It calls the legislation a “a victory for cash-strapped states, parents, children and middle class families across our country.” “Thank you, Congress!” crows the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). The National Education Association (NEA) is just a tad less sycophantic about bill’s passage, but its story gushes praise for the Democrats too -and fails to mention the food stamp cuts. The AAUP, (the American Association of University Professors) notes, correctly, that post-secondary education was short-changed in the bill and that public higher education is a right. Still, it mentions nothing about the food stamp provision when it calls for Congress “to similarly attend to maintaining and building human capacity in postsecondary education.” 
    The NEA and AFT have allowed the Democrats to save teachers’ jobs by, quite literally, stealing food from children. The bill is a giveaway to the unions only if you think that teacher unions can defeat the neoliberal onslaught by sticking to the old “bread and butter” unionism they have practiced for decades. The 140,000 saved  jobs came at a very steep political cost: Teachers unions have lost legitimacy as a force capable of mounting a meaningful challenge to the barbarism that demands that kids go hungry to pay for teacher salaries.

  • Update to "Mean Bastards as Culture Heroes"

    A note on "Mean Bastards": This short piece, posted after the death of George Steinbrenner, has received a kind of confirmation in Ellen DeGeneres walking out on her five year contract worth tens of millions with "American Idol." I had criticized Simon Cowell (a former AI judge) along with Steinbrenner, Trump, etc. as "Mean Bastards." According to the New York Times, DeGeneres seemed "uncomfortable in the judges' chair… she had a hard time hurting the feelings of the young contestants who… get voted off each week during the live telecasts…"  Current American culture is so mean that we have to look wherever we can to find resistance to it.

  • Obama's speech to the Urban League: Selling a toxic remedy

    President Obama’s speech to the Urban League about education July 29 didn’t cover any new ground, but there were some shifts worth noting. He tweaked his administration’s rhetorical stance towards teachers and teacher unions, adopting a less combative stance than his and Arne Duncan’s support for firing teachers in a “failing” Rhode Island school. No doubt in response to teachers’ outrage and resulting snubs from the two national teacher unions at their national conventions, Obama now says “the vast majority of teachers are working tirelessly, are passionate about their students, are often digging into their own pockets for basic supplies, are going above and beyond the call of duty.” Score one point for reality.

    Reality loses when Obama discusses the reasons poor kids (of color) have lower levels of academic achievement. The kids are “victims” to be sure, but of their communities, as he says? Of parents failure to support “educational excellence?” What about racism? Addressing criticisms that he is “always talking about parental responsibility in front of black folks?” Obama responded, “I talk about parent responsibility wherever I talk about education.” This flip explanation ignores the rhetorical defense of reforms his (and the Bush administration) have made to schools – leaving no child behind. The “child” in case is understood to be black or Hispanic.

    Neoliberal reforms, including Obama and Duncan’s “Race to the Top,” have been touted as the means to equalize educational outcomes. But we know what’s occurred when these reforms have been imposed by the World Bank. They increase social inequality. They decrease school attendance and graduation rates. They decrease rates of literacy in countries with previously high literacy rates. All of this has been documented by researchers, especially in Latin America, where the reforms were put in place by military dictatorships (supported by the US). When you compare the analysis of Adriana Puiggros about reforms  in Latin America to “Race to the top” you see an identical architecture.

     *Gut the power of traditional sources of school oversight, like school boards, by creating lots of “alternative schools” that function free of social control.
    *Judge schools, teachers, and students exclusively by standardized tests (created by private companies).
    *Create pressure to privatize by refusing to fund all schools adequately. Dole out a relatively small amount of additional funding to parties that conform to the master plan.
    * Attack the teachers unions – which are the greatest impediment to the project.

    The other assumption in Obama’s speech is that education is the key to the nation’s economic resurgence. As Jean Anyon and Kiersten Greene demonstrate, new jobs being created require less education, not more. If we want to put people back to work, we have to create well-paying jobs and beef up social supports, which is what Obama and the Democrats should be doing. We know from looking at the rest of the world and from documention by advocates-turned-critic, most recently, Diane Ravitch, that the policies he advances are destroying public education in all but name.

    Obama boasts that four billion dollars is being awarded to the winners of his race. That sounds like a lot of money. But NYC alone had an operating budget of 21.9 billion dollars last year, and a piddling $800 million extra came from the federal government legislation to save jobs. Or compare the four billion dollars for education to the recent appropriation for war-related costs, $59 billion (a comparison the still neo-conservative Diane Ravitch won’t make – but we should).

    I’ve encountered many liberals who are reluctant to criticize Obama in public, taking what they assume to be his desire to do good to excuse the harm done by his educational policies. Obama demands “accountability” from schools and teachers. We should use the same standard in judging his administration. Whether the increase in social inequality his policies are bringing is intended or not is ultimately irrelevant.  I hope the Urban League wasn’t buying Obama’s speech. He’s a great showman selling a toxic remedy.

  • Hacker and Dreifus’s Higher Education? A Neocon Screed

    I admire Claudia Dreifus’s interviews with scientists in the New York Times Tuesday Science section, and particularly her attention to women in science, and I know of her honorable history in the left and feminism. So I befriended her on Facebook. There she publicized her book, with Andrew Hacker, Higher Education? How Colleges are Wasting Our Money and Failing our Kids – and What we Can Do About It, to be published by Times Books/Henry Holt on August 3. To my dismay, the book turns out to be propaganda for a neoliberal program of cuts in higher education, part of the international retreat from earlier social gains in pensions, vacations, education, health care, and part of the attacks on social services and on public employees. Although I was never an Obama fan, I guess I feel a little like those who were, but who now see their illusions smashed by another blast of right-wing centrism — in Hacker and Dreifus’s case, dressed up as liberalism. I read Hacker and Dreifus’s (HD) book. I found myself at home with their endorsement of unionization of teaching assistants, a cause in which I have long been active. And of course I share their disapproval of high salaries for college presidents (page 242). And although it never seems to occur to HD that government support might do away with exorbitant tuitions, of course one has to agree with their protests against through-the-roof tuitions. In their book, these generally available platitudes are used as the vehicles to carry conservative freight. With the above exceptions, HD is compatible with current right-wing thought on the frivolity of higher education and the need to cut it back. Indeed, although they solicited blurbs from liberals, support is beginning to emerge from neocons and will doubtless flower when the book is officially published and public debate begins. What is their program? HD seek to cut back faculty research, publication and sabbaticals as expensive gewgaws. They describe abolition of tenure as their most important goal (239-240). They want to banish medical schools and research institutes from campuses and send into such exile those who want to engage in research (242). They want to abolish paid sabbaticals: as they see it, we have too many new books and articles already (240)! (I had two sabbaticals in thirty-nine years of teaching, the last one at 50% of salary. In an era of HDian cutbacks, they are rarer and rarer.) They dismiss as a mere “mantra” (62) the idea that research is relevant to teaching, and they seem to understand the connection only in regard to keeping up with the literature – a notion that they dismiss with a quotation from right-winger William Bennett (83), who was among other things Reagan’s Secretary of Education. HD like what Bennett says so much that they use it again: (238). They also call in that amazing Straussian (and defender of Lawrence Summers at Harvard), Harvey Mansfield, to testify in support of their ridicule of courses on such subjects as gay autobiography; and the break-up of Yugoslavia (84-85). It never occurs to them that doing research acquaints the researcher first-hand with the complexities of establishing truth – a notion that should be close to the heart of good teaching. But for HD, “there’s an inverse correlation between good teaching and academic research” (89. (After I had predicted that HD’s book would get a warm response from neocons, I came across the following in support of HD in a largely critical Forum on the Chronicle of Higher Education website. The writer, Robert W. Tucker, is a noted neocon (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_W._Tucker) “Great article! I appreciated the fact that you are willing to put yourselves on the line with concrete suggestions which, for the most part, generate empirically testable claims. .. Again, with so much rancor and narrow opinion expressed on these pages, it is refreshing to see your piece. My disagreement with some of your points is part of the rational process. Robert W Tucker) HD belittle the work of preparing and teaching and instead comment on “how little is asked from professors during the months when classes are taught” (26). Andrew taught Political Science at Queens College in CUNY, but there is next to nothing about this besieged institution – with the exception of his retrieval from his years at Queens snide memories (“several years ago”) of the job candidate who had the temerity to ask about teaching load and sabbaticals (13-14). (I retired from CUNY when I found that my body could no longer support a four-course teaching load.) What about the curriculum that HD’s non-researchers will carry out? HD hope for a return to teaching the “Great Ideas.” They praise Allan Bloom’s teaching (80) but never mention this University of Chicago professor’s national impact with his 1987 Closing of the American Mind – the right wing of the culture wars – of which their book is in a sense a sequel/updating. In short. HD don’t think about the grotesque funding cutbacks for higher education while offering rationales for more of the same. Their vision for American higher education is quite Dickensian, with Oliver Twist as the professoriate that asks for more, not less, in pursuit of the goals of education for all. =================================================================== Dreifus-Lemisch discussion To her credit, Claudia Dreifus argued these issues through (though not satisfactorily) on Facebook. Here are some selections from the back-and-forth. With limited skills, I have attempted to arrange them with the most recent first. Lemisch: I welcome this discussion, Claudia, and hope you will stay with it. (It may be good preparation for what lies ahead :-)). About Bloom: you endorse a return to teaching the Great Ideas. That inevitably combines with complimentary mention of Bloom. I can't imagine doing that without at least a parenthetical mention of disagreement with his right-wing views, but I don't think you do disagree with those educational ideas. You say you don't view these issues "on a left-right axis." At a time of world-wide neo-liberal cutbacks in civilized gains in health, education, pensions, retirement, vacations, "entitlements," etc. you had better see the political context in which you propose your wholly compatible cutbacks. You appear to take the high road when you say, despite the Bloom matter, "we'll let students make their own judgments about ideology." Fine: but this hardly fits with your endorsement of Bloomian ideas for the curriculum, whose conservatism I know first hand from experience teaching at the University of Chicago. Your science interviews are wonderful. If you and Andrew achieve what you want in this book, I guess the scientists will be even more dependent on corporate funding. Certainly you don't want these unproductive drones taking up space in expensive buildings for their career-building research, and all the while, not spending enough time teaching undergraduates. Dreifus: Jesse, I’m a journalist, not a politician. I don’t think about “political context.” Lemisch: Say it ain’t so, Claudia. People who don’t think about the ‘political context’are well on their way to accepting bad political ideas rather than questioning them. Lemisch: Yes, I've seen your blurbs. Your failure to think about political context leaves you ill prepared for praise from rightwingers. Really, except for your endorsement of adjunct unionization, I can't see much that they would disagree with, including especially your support for abolition of tenure. The approval you have received from Neocon Robert W. Tucker (Chronicle of Higher Education site) is a sign of what's to come. How you will deal with such praise for your program? It should make you think twice about ignoring political context — or perhaps you'll just be happy with praise from the right. Lemisch: Definitely: cut back on colleges and universities, faculty sabbaticals and research, etc. Run them more like prisons, and more cheaply! Really, Glen Beck et al will eat up these prescriptions. How do we distinguish contemporary centrism from the right? Dreifus: Hey Jesse, how about actually reading the book, or even the article for that matter, before making knee-jerk judgements and calling names. We're not talking about cutting back on colleges and education, but on hot-tubs and gyms. We're for paying adjuncts a living wage and valuing the work of people who actually teach the next generation. Paying senior professors NOT to teach is part of the escalating cost- game that hurts access, we believe. You may disagree, but that doesn't mean we're advocating anything at all like what you suggest. Lemisch: In fact I have indeed read the book. Good for the two of you about TA unions. But consider the following things you endorse: cut back on faculty research , publication and sabbaticals as expensive frivolities; get rid of the research functions of universities, even in situations like Minnesota where these functions grow out of earlier Progressive movements; don't talk about grotesque funding cutbacks while offering rationales for more of the same; return to teaching "the great ideas" (Allan Bloom? You praise him while ignoring what he was about); return to "peasant soup" and the other horrors of traditional college dining hall menus (presumably including getting rid of Yale dining halls attempts at locally grown food). High priced presidents, Abu Dhabi campuses etc. should definitely go, but you use these as vehicles to convey otherwise conservative messages. Too bad. I know your positive side and regret that you have fallen into this stuff. Lemisch: I guess the tragedy of this, Claudia, is that you don't indeed think that you are advocating a conservative agenda, but with some exceptions, that's what it is. Look forward to adoring reviews from the right.

  • Mean Bastards as Culture Heroes

             All day long, and on into a second day, here in New York, the media have been full of George Steinbrenner. He’s always been a Mean Bastard — even in the Seinfeld version — and that’s how he is memorialized: a Mean Bastard and a Winner. Sometimes he’s represented as a Mean-Bastard-with-a Heart-of-Gold-who-Gave-Money-to-Good-Causes. It would seem paradoxical to be deep in grief over a man universally acknowledged to be a Mean Bastard. But, it’s no paradox: the culture is in such depraved condition that MBs are adored, even by many of those on whose faces they tread.

             Consider the following media figures, bound together in a complex that delights in meanness and brutality:

             Steinbrenner, “The Boss,” was known for firing people. So is Donald Trump (“The Apprentice”), who fires people with his trade-mark “You’re Fired!” Despite a catastrophic employment situation, he is widely admired for this.

             Simon Cowell was the abusive judge on “American Idol,” where his central role was to be as insulting as he could in dismissing the candidates who performed before him.

             Like the others, Judge Judy deals in explosive insult. And consider the brutality of “The Bachelor” and “The Bachelorette” — more versions of “You’re Fired!” If these things get you down, watch Dr. Phil berate people in the name of tough love.

             If you haven’t seen these horrors, you ought to acquaint yourself with them. They give strength to the environment in which Sarah Palin and the rest operate, as well as the more sophisticated versions seen in David Brooks et. al. Indeed, this cultural phenomenon may be in some ways more important than the politics that surfs along on the wave that these people help to create.

             We need to present and get out there in new ways an alternate set of values, just, humane and non-competitive. The left won’t make a better world so long as we dismiss such concerns as “soft,” and leave the presentation of alternate values to the right, or to Oprah.

  • The Decommissioners – Update

    The trial of the Decommissioners lasted three weeks, in which time the jury heard not only from the Decommissioners but also detailed evidence of war crimes committed in Palestine and testimony from EDO managing director Paul Hills, who faced questions about his company’s dealings with Israel. All the defendants were acquitted by unanimous jury decisions. One of the defendants, Chris Osmond, said: “It was the right verdict. Our action was because nobody else was willing to take action.
    “During one operation 1,400 people had been killed, 350 children had died, and nobody was willing to take action. Our politicians and the United Nations were not taking action to support the people of Gaza and it was necessary for ordinary people to take action like we did.”

    He added: “Ordinary people in Brighton won’t stop campaigning until EDO MBM closes down. We are going to be here until they are not.”

  • Teachers in Oaxaca: A Review

    Diana Denham and the C.A.S.A. Collective, Teaching Rebellion: Stories from the Grassroots Mobilization in Oaxaca (Oakland: PM Press, 2008) and Peter Kuper, A Sketchbook Journal of Two Years in Oaxaca (Oakland: PM Press, 2009).

    The young PM Press of Oakland has published two interesting and quite different books about the civic uprising in Oaxaca in 2006. Teaching Rebellion by Diana Denham and the C.A.S.A. Collective brings together 23 interviews with people who participated in or were caught up in the Oaxaca rebellion together with a concluding essay by Gustavo Esteva and a study guide by Patrick Lincoln. The book is profusely illustrated with photographs. Peter Kuper's A Sketchbook Journal of Two Years in Oaxaca is a beautiful and bilingual book of drawing, paintings, cartoons, and photographs — a collage of the two years he spent in the city with his family.

    The interviews in Teaching Rebellion were done by the C.A.S.A. Collective, "a group of international activists, human rights observers, and volunteers for grassroots organizations." The 23 subjects of the interviews come from many walks of life in Oaxaca — teacher, student, housewife, vendor, reporter, and many others. The oldest person interviewed was in her 70s and the youngest just 9 years old, though most were young adults and middle aged people who had taken part in the movement, including involvement in the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca (APPO) which became for a while a kind of alternative government, peoples' government in the city. The interviews constitute a view of the movement from the grassroots.

    All of the important events of the Oaxaca Commune, as some have called this experience, are discussed from the teachers' sit-in, to the mega-marches, to the movement's seizing of the radio stations, and the creation of APPO. Personally, I found most moving the testimony of Aurelia, a 50-year old illiterate maid who had not participated in the movement, but who found herself caught up in the repression, mistreated, insulted, flown out of Oaxaca and jailed in the state of Nayarit. Her story, and the stories of others who faced repression — including the 20 killed by death squads — remind one of the tremendous force of the state unleashed against participants in the movement.

    What seems missing from these interviews, however, is any discussion of the internal political debates within the movement. For example, we have no real discussions of the conflicts within the Oaxaca local of the Mexican Teachers Union (el SNTE) or between el SNTE and the APPO. The leftist groups that existed in both the SNTE and APPO and in the movement, such as the Communist Party Marxist-Leninist of Mexico and the Popular Revolutionary Front, are not mentioned. The guerrilla group, the People's Revolutionary Army (EPR), is mentioned but not really discussed by any of the participants. Since all of these groups were, to one degree or another, actors in the 2006 uprising, so one wonders why the C.A.S.A. apparently avoided talking with people who would have identified themselves as members of one of these groups, so that they could discuss their political views. What was the interaction between the grassroots activists portrayed here and the political organizations? The absence of a discussion of these groups and their politics leads one to feel that the book has been sanitized, presenting all grassroots activists as political innocents.

    One also feels — though the authors should not be faulted for this — that we would like a more complete vision of the Oaxaca events of 2006. We need other books that tell us what Governor Ulises Ruíz of the Institutional Revolutionary Party and President Vicente Fox were doing and thinking at the same time. We want to know what the local political and political and police authorities in Oaxaca talked about during the rebellion. We would like to know what the very rich of Oaxaca did during the rebellion as well as the comfortably well off. What was the larger social and political picture into which this civic uprising fit?

    Kuper, his wife and daughter arrived in Oaxaca in July 2006 and spent two years there, years which he recorded in his sketchbooks. As he writes, he felt compelled to capture Oaxaca's "dark times" but also to "capture its light." Kuper's sketchbooks — turned into what is a beautiful, colorful art book — accompanied by a bilingual diary, touch on all the famous sites and activities that tourists find and locals know in Oaxaca. His drawings are clever and campy, kitch and corny, funny and wild. Anyone who has spent some time in Mexico and particularly in Oaxaca, will be reminded looking at this book and reading the text of their own experiences. The book is charming.

    In truth, the events of the upheaval of 2006 represent only a small part of this book. Kuper has captured much more of Oaxaca's light than of its dark times. That too proves useful, allowing us to situate the year of upheaval within the broader context of a city filled with tourists and visitors like Kuper himself.

  • The Israeli Military and the "Decommissioners"

    On the 17th of January 2009, Israeli warplanes pounded the terrified inhabitants of the densely populated Gaza strip in over 50 air-strikes. It was the 22nd day of Operation Cast Lead, the Israeli military assault on Gaza that left an estimated 1400 dead, including over 300 children.
    In the early hours of that morning on a quiet industrial estate 2000 miles away, six peace activists scaled the perimeter fencing of the UK factory EDO/ITT, which, it is claimed, makes vital components for Israeli F-16s – the backbone of the airforce bombarding Gaza. After entering the factory through a broken window, the six set about systematically destroying computers and machinery with hammers. When they were finished ‘decommissioning’ the factory, they had caused an estimated $300,000 worth of damage. They then lay on the floor and waited to be arrested.
    The trial of the activists, who have become known as the ‘Decommissioners’, began a week after Israel once again caused international outcry – this time with killing of nine peace activists, whom Israel accused of being a violent ‘lynch mob’. Like the attempts to defend the Mavi Marmara from Israeli commandos, the actions of the Decommissioners have sparked fierce debate over the line between passive resistance and aggressive action and how far it is reasonable to go in defying aggression. The activists stand accused of conspiracy to commit criminal damage. They are pleading not guilty on the grounds that they were acting to prevent a greater crime – the killing of civilians in Gaza. In a video statement filmed before the action, one of the six, Elijah Smith, said:"I don't feel I'm going to do anything illegal tonight, but I'm going to go into an arms factory and smash it up to the best of my ability so that it cannot actually work or produce munitions … [which] have been provided to the Israeli army."
    The trial is set to last for seven weeks, during which time the defendents hope to prove that components produced in the UK factory are used by Israel in the occupied territories, a fact which the company denies. If they are found guilty they could face years in prison. The Decommissioners are supporters of Smash EDO, an often controversial anti-militarist campaign that has targeted the EDO/ITT factory in Brighton, on the south coast of England, since 2004. The campaign grew out of the disillusionment with the massive but ultimately ineffectual anti-Iraq war movement guided by the Stop the War coalition. Smash EDO spokesperson Chloe Marsh said: “If, when millions of people were mobilised against the war across the UK, we had looked at who the companies were who were set to make a profit from the war and targeted them, our resistance could have been far more effective.”
    But the decision to target individual arms manufacturers was not the only tactical break from the Stop the War campaign. Writing in British magazine Red Pepper, Smash EDO’s Andrew Beckett said: “The whole thrust of the Stop the War coalition’s approach was that marching from Hyde Park to Trafalgar Square would ultimately compel the government to see sense. A march, a few speeches and a coach home … is it any wonder that our government felt safe to go to war?” Instead, Smash EDO’s approach has been determinedly focussed on direct action.
    The campaign announced itself with a rooftop occupation and has maintained pressure on the factory with diverse and frequently confrontational tactics – from noise demos and street theatre to lock-ons and the dumping of manure and concrete outside the factory. The tactics have often wilfully crossed the line of peaceful, legal protest, with the campaign insistent on differentiating between moral law and legal law. The factory and its investors have been consistently targeted for vandalism. Protests at the factory have seen activists bursting into the compound, smashing the windows and graffitiing the building, while street demonstrations have led to aggressive confrontations with police after their attempts to confine and control protesters. The relentless pressure has had a serious impact on EDO. It has cost the company millions in legal costs, lost working time, security costs and property damage. One of the company’s two premises in Brighton has already closed down, staffing levels are down and eight directors, including the managing director, have resigned since the campaign started.
    The success of Smash EDO has also inspired activists around the country to set up similar campaigns. Groups in the cities of Nottingham, Manchester and Bristol have launched their own direct action campaigns targeting arms companies Heckler and Koch, Brimar and US company Raytheon. The proliferation of these campaigns has British activists talking excitedly about a new ‘anti-militarism network’ that gives impetus and energy to a peace movement that increasing numbers of frustrated activists are calling ineffective and obsolete.
    However, the campaign’s tactics have drawn heavy criticism, not only from a hostile media but also from many on the traditional left, who have accused the group of alienating the public with their aggressive street presence and property destruction. Milan Rai, co-editor of the British newspaper Peace News, wrote: “The question is whether the tactics that can win particular battles contribute to larger successes, or whether they may be undermining the building of the mass base of opposition that is essential to overall victory.”
    The activists behind Smash EDO hotly dispute this. Instead, they say, the barrier to building a mass movement is the belief that it is impossible to change anything, no matter how many feet march through the streets. Like the activists aboard the Freedom Flotilla, Smash EDO’s supporters maintain that the only way to break through this barrier is with real, not symbolic action. Amongst British anti-militarists, no one has taken that idea further than the Decommissioners.
    While opinions on the justification of their actions remain deeply divided in Britain, according to Ewa Jasiewicz, a human rights activist, journalist and eyewitness to Operation Cast Lead, people in Gaza are less equivocal. She recently commented: “I told many people in Gaza about the people’s strike on EDO… When I recounted this action to people, I saw an expression come over their faces that I hadn’t encountered before when talking about international solidarity. It was a kind of respect, a sense of surprised pride at a tiny move towards a levelling between the blood sacrifices and living hell of so many here, and sacrifices made by people in comparative comfort zones on the other side of the world – for them.”

  • Metal Workers & Miners Unions Consider Merger

    Unions Representing Workers in Canada, Mexico qnd U.S. Explore Merger:
    Would Create International Union of One Million Metal Workers and Miners

         The United Steelworkers (USW), which represents 850,000 workers in Canada, the Caribbean and the United States, and the National Union of Miners and Metal Workers (SNTMMRM), known as the Mineros, which represents 180,000 workers in Mexico, have announced plans to explore uniting into one international union. The agreement to begin exploration of a merger was signed on June 21.

         This first step in the creation of a global union—as opposed to a global federation of unions—represents a significant new development for labor in the Americas with implications for workers around the world. Building on the 2008 trans-Atlantic merger between Unite in the United Kingdom and the USW, now the USW and the Mineros are working to build a worldwide labor union with the power to confront the concentrated capital of the mining and metal working industries.

         USW President Leo W. Gerard and Minero general secretary Napoleón Gómez Urrutia together asserted the two unions continued “common commitment to democracy, equality, and solidarity for working men and women throughout North America and throughout the world.”

         The two unions have had a strategic alliance since 2005. Now a commission made up of five members from each of the unions will create a joint commission to propose “immediate measures to increase strategic cooperation between our organizations as well as the steps required to form a unified organization.”

    Several Years of Close Cooperation

         The attempt to create an international union by these two unions arises within the context of the 16-year old North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) countries. Since NAFTA took effect in on January 1, 1994, several Canadian, Mexican and U.S. unions have sought greater cooperation as they faced transnational corporations with new reach and power. This is, however, the first attempt to create a new international union in response to the greater mobility and power of international capital since NAFTA and what has been called the neoliberal era of privatization and free trade.

         This new development also comes as a result of several years of intense and intimate collaboration between the Steelworkers and the Mineros at many different levels. The two unions have joined together in campaigns against common employers and in mutual support on issues facing them. Most notably, the USW has helped the Mineros as it came under a brutal attack by Grupo Mexico, that country’s largest mining company, and by the administration of Felipe Calderón, Mexico’s president. “

         When the Mexican government brought trumped up charges against the Mineros’ general secretary, Napoleón Gómez Urrutia, threatening to jail him, the USW played a central role in helping him find safety in Vancouver, B.C. For three years with the aid of the USW, he has been leading the Mineros through a series of difficult strikes and other confrontations from that city.

    History of U.S.-Mexico International Solidarity

         This is by no means the first time that unions in the three countries have attempted to build more powerful labor organizations through international solidarity. The path to solidarity has been fraught with problems and strewn with the wreckage of failures, while at the same time filled with inspiring examples and some significant successes. While today’s situation poses altogether new challenges, the past history holds some lessons too.

         With the development of modern industrial capitalism in all three nations in the late nineteenth century, there developed a complex exchange of organizational methods, union strategies and tactics, and social and political programs. At the center of the process was the construction of the railroad networks first in the United States and Canada and then in Mexico.

         Mostly the influence spread from the more advanced and industrialized United States with a long history of trade unionism to Mexico. Those railroad lines, built by U.S. and British capital, employed British, Canadian and mostly U.S. railroad workers. The American railroad workers carried with them their 16 craft railroad craft unions and their practice of striking the employer over grievances, structures and strategies soon imitated by the Mexican workers.

         Mexican workers who went to work in the mining industry in the United States joined the American Federation of Labor (AFL) unions or more frequently the Western Federation of Miners or the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), adopting their militant strategies and revolutionary syndicalist politics. The influence was not all one way. The Mexican Liberal Party, actually a revolutionary anarchist group, came to organize workers in Mexico and sometimes in the Southwest of the United States.

         After the discovery of oil in the Mexican states along the Gulf of Mexico around 1900, accompanied by the growth of oil storage and shipping facilities at the docks, the IWW became established there among the oil workers. At the same time, Spanish revolutionary syndicalists won a strong base among seamen, and their influence spread into the ports of Mexico, while Spanish anarchists came to organize department store clerks, restaurant workers, and factory workers in central Mexico. Their influence became pervasive. By the time of the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution in 1910, the anarchist House of the World Worker with branches in many major Mexican cities had become the dominant labor movement.

    The Mexican Revolution and Samuel Gompers

         During the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920), the Constitutionalists—founders of what would eventually evolve into the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and rule Mexico for decades—reached an agreement with a faction of the House of the World Worker to provide troops for that wing of the revolution in exchange for support for the union’s organizing efforts. So thousands of workers organized in Red Battalions rode off to fight Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata, leaders of the plebeian and peasant leftwing of the revolution. Thus the Mexican state came to control the formerly anarchist labor movement.

         In those years, as the new state was being established first under Venustiano Carranza and then under Álvaro Obregón, Samuel Gompers, head of the American Federation of Labor moved into Mexico. The new Mexican government welcomed Gompers as an aid in helping to create the state-sponsored Regional Confederation of Mexican Workers (CROM) which with the government was fighting to destroy the anarchist General Confederation of Workers (CGT). So between 1920 and 1925, anarchist unions with an internationalist perspective battled the business unions with a nationalist vision backed by the Mexican government, a war ultimately won by the government-backed unions with the breaking of the Mexico City streetcar workers union in 1924.

         Gompers principal aim, however, was to expand the reach of his Pan-American Federation of Labor (PAFL), an international union confederation that had already established branches in the U.S., Canada and Puerto Rico. As U.S. capital and the U.S. State Department spread their power and influence throughout Latin America, Gompers expected to see the PAFL spread the model of his so-called “pure-and-simple” trade unionism, sweeping aside the Red unions of anarchists and Communists. Gompers death in 1924 followed by the Crash in 1929, and the Great Depression for the next decade meant that his dream was never realized.

    The 1930s Upsurge and the Post-War Right Turn

         The worldwide economic crisis of the 1930s led to a working class upsurge in Canada, Mexico and the United States, initially under the leadership of a variety of political leaderships: Socialist and Communist, Catholic and conservative, but all independent of the employers and their respective governments. The brief period 1929 to 1939 saw powerful unions and new labor federations grow up in all three countries.

         In the United States and Canada, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) organized industrial workers, while in Mexico the new Confederation of Mexican Workers (CTM) organized a broad spectrum of workers in industries of all sorts. The CIO and the CTM and some of their industrial unions established strong fraternal relations during this period. The CIO-CTM alliance evolved and was transformed during the course of the U.S.-Mexico alliance against the Axis Powers during World War II. Both the CIO and the CTM emerged from the war having been drawn into closer relations of partnership with the corporations and with their respective governments.

         With the outbreak of the Cold War in 1948, the governments of both the United States and Mexico, working closely with the employers forced a purge of leftists from the unions, while in the U.S. the Taft-Hartley Law hamstrung the unions. In Mexico the purge was particularly violent and brutal, as the Mexican government sent police and gangsters into the industrial unions to conduct a transfer of leadership at gun point. The independent elected union leaders were turned out in favor of men would were loyal to the government.

         So by the 1950s, while ties still existed between the CIO and the CTM, they were now relations between U.S. labor officials who working closely with the U.S. State Department and American corporations and Mexican officials subservient to their government. Meanwhile, around the world labor unions divided between the Communist-led and pro-Soviet World Federation of Trade Unions and the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions led by U.S. and European unions under the tutelage of the U.S. State Department. Within this context, real working class solidarity virtually disappeared, as the U.S. and Mexican unions’ tasks on the international scene became working to stop Communist, nationalist and other radical unions throughout the Americas.

         For a hundred years attempts to build international worker solidarity have been disrupted by the imperial power of U.S. corporations and the U.S. State Department and by the Mexican nationalist government, as well as by conservative business unions loyal either to government or employers. Genuine international worker solidarity was greatest during periods of working class upsurge in the 1910s and 1930s within the context of worldwide labor mobilizations. The opening of the era of globalization raised new challenges.

    NAFTA Changes the Game

         Such was the state of labor solidarity in North America in the 1990s when the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was being negotiated. NAFTA, opened up the borders to capital (while keeping the movement of labor restricted), suddenly changed the rules. While the U.S. and Mexican union bureaucrats of the AFL-CIO and the CTM had been able to cooperate within the context of the Cold War, they suddenly found themselves at odds in the age of neoliberalism and free trade.

         U.S. labor unions opposed NAFTA, fearing that it would lead to the importation of products produced with cheap labor, commodities which would undermine their employers’ market share and therefore their jobs. Mexico’s “official” or government controlled unions such as the CTM had no choice but to follow the government’s directives and support the agreement. With U.S. unions opposed to NAFTA and Mexico’s “official” unions support it, the pact between the AFL-CIO and the “official” CTM practically dissolved under the impact of NAFTA, forcing U.S. unions to look for other relationships. At the same time, independent unions in Mexico which were critical of NAFTA also looked for other relationships abroad.

         The United Electrical Workers (UE) which represented workers in the United States, and which was not part of the AFL-CIO, discovered the independent Authentic Labor Front (FAT) in the early NAFTA period. Those two unions formed a model strategic alliance, and many other U.S. and Mexicans began to establish ties of various sorts in the 1990s and 2000s. The Communications Workers of America (CWA), for example,, established a relationship with the Mexican Telephone Workers Union (STRM). At times there were attempts to establish broader organizations around specific industries or problems, such as the Coalition for Justice in the Maquiladoras.

    Steelworkers and Mineros: Toward Unity

         All of this then forms the long and complicated background to the events taking place today, at the center of which now, however, is fight against the mining companies. At the moment the USW is in the 11th month of a strike of 3,500 of its members against Vale Inco, a huge Brazilian mining company in Sudbury, Canada, while the Mineros, after three years on strike at Cananea, Sonora, face the military occupation of their town to break the strike. The USW and Mineros plan to build the power to stop such assaults on miners and metal workers in the Americas.

         The Minero-Steelworker agreement to begin exploration of unity represents an exciting new development in international labor solidarity. With such unity, workers might have greater power in confronting the transnational mining and metal companies, and could respond to challenges more rapidly and with more flexibility than a federation of union usually can. Still, the challenges to this process will be enormous. No doubt both the employers and the governments will work to sabotage any arrangement which threatens to empower workers, and the unions themselves which have worked together so well for the last few years will face new challenges in developing a common leadership, organizational structure, philosophy, strategy and vision.

     

    Dan La Botz, a teacher, writer, and activist, lives in Cincinnati, Ohio.

  • The Gaza Flotilla

           Alan Dershowitz has suggested that to be effective Israeli propaganda should support 80 percent of what Israel does, and be critical of the other 20 percent. So I expected that Dershowitz would only approve 80% of the Israeli killings on the Gaza flotilla, while expressing some mild criticism regarding the IDF’s other victims. Silly me. Dershowitz promptly weighed in to declare that the Israeli assault was “entirely consistent” with international law.

           Anyone concerned with reality might check out the hour-long video smuggled out by Iara Lee or the legal arguments by Lynda Brayer, George Bisharat, the Lawyers Committee for Palestinian Rights, or Ben Saul of the National Lawyers’ Guild, among others. And regardless of what exactly took place on the Miva Marmara, the crucial context of the whole situation — as I argued in my article But What Could Israel Do? — is that the blockade has nothing to do with Israeli security, since Israel could always end rocket attacks on its people by agreeing to a ceasefire with Hamas that included a lifting of the blockade. This Israel has been unwilling to do, just as it has been unwilling to end the occupation by accepting an independent and viable Palestinian state on the territories it seized in 1967.

            The craven Congressional Democrats have been giving full backing to Israel, including its latest flotilla attack. Among the more disgusting contributions have been Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) openly endorsing collective punishment against the civilian population of Gaza, and Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA), chair of the House subcommittee on terrorism, nonproliferation and trade, urging the prosecution of U.S. citizens involved with the flotilla.. More significantly, the White House has blocked any international action against Israel.

            This is supporting Israel not just 80 percent, but 110 percent.

  • Max Lane on Indonesia: A review

    Max Lane. Unfinished Revolution: Indonesia Before and After Suharto. New York: Verso, 2008. 312 pages. Notes, index. $29.95

          Perhaps no other non-Indonesian knows as much about Indonesia, its culture, and the left as the Australian Max Lane, lecturer on Asian Studies at the University of Sydney. Lane is responsible for the magnificent translation of Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s great novel The Buru Quartet, as well as being the translator of other works by that author and other writers. In addition, he worked for years with various dramatists and actors in the Indonesian theater, and he is a writer and poet in his own right. He has also been a leading figure in building solidarity with the Indonesian left and popular movements and over the years written innumerable articles about the struggles against the Suharto dictatorship and the tumultuous period which followed it. (See his blog.)

          Unfinished Revolution represents Lane’s attempt to tell the story of modern Indonesian people’s movement, of the left, and of the most important contemporary far-left party, the Partai Rakyat Demokratik (PRD). It also represents an important interpretation of the history of modern Indonesia, a country dominated first by the figure and following of Sukarno, leader of the national revolution against the Dutch, and later dominated by the murderous counter-revolution and dictatorship of Suharto, undertaker of the national revolution. For Lane, the crushing of the Sukarno-led national revolution interrupted the emergence of an Indonesian nation, culture, and a movement toward socialism. The Suharto coup which killed between one and two million people left the revolution therefore unfinished. Lane argues that the common people—rakyat in Indonesian—stood at the center of that process and also represents its future.

          Lane’s book deals with the period between the Suharto coup in 1965 and 2008 when he completed his book, supplemented with some discussion of the Sukarno period which preceded it. He argues that the Indonesian national movement led to a period of intense activism and movement building in the post-independence period of Sukarno and again in the period leading up to the overthrow of Suharto and just after. For Lane, the heart of the Indonesian national revolution has been this experience of activism and its life in the country’s popular consciousness and history as well as in its literature, above all in the literature of Toer and of the poet Rendra.

          Lane tells how small groups of students helped to detonate broader popular movements of workers, the urban poor, and peasants which within a decade brought about the overthrow of Suharto. The student movement evolved into many NGOs and social movements, a kind of civil society movement which provided a broad base of young activists. The PRD, the leading group on the far left, played a central role in this process through its advocacy of aksi [actions]—demonstrations, strikes, and other confrontations with the dictatorship—which created powerful movements. In doing this, they and other parties built on lingering memories in the popular consciousness of the Sukarno nationalist period. The PRD and the student left, however, constructed movement but failed to establish more stable institutions, and most important failed to build a major political party to give expression to that movement.

          After Suharto fell, the PRD promoted “peoples committees” among workers, the urban poor and peasants, but these caught on in only a few areas of this immense island nation. Reformist figures, some with ties to the Suharto regime and huge organizational bases—Megawati Sukarnoputri, Abdurrahman Wahid, and Amien Rais—succeeded in out maneuvering the small leftist groups which had been key to overthrowing Suharto. In the post-Suharto period, actions and movements continued, but they became ever more fragmented.

          Faced with these problem posed by this failure of the movement, and attempting to salvage it, Lane argues at one point that “Aksi [protest action] itself is a form of organization.” (p. 209) Or he suggests that the student movement of the 1990s lives on in intellectual criticism. Perhaps. But by the time Lane wrote his book, the student movement had disappeared and other social movements were marginal, without influence on society. The left had failed to build a mass party. Meanwhile the left suffered a crisis of leadership as it confronted the problem of generational change. Lane suggests that the future lies with the memory of Sukarnoism, with the people, and with a revival of activism.

          While there is much to be learned about the left in Indonesia between 1990 and 2008 from Lane’s book, his interpretation of events seems to me quite problematic and contradictory. While Lane would consider himself a Marxist, his book becomes a defense of the left nationalist populism of Sukarno and his followers and of the revival of that populist current in the 1990s movements and in the PRD. He argues that because the working class is so small and the numbers of rural and urban poor so large, workers’ unions will not be the central organizations of labor, while the impoverished masses of the rakyat or people constitute the agent for social change. For them protest movements and riots are their natural forms of struggle and also lie at the heart of the popular culture. Yet, he recognizes that such populist movements remain fragmented, and even at their best often become subject to patron-client relationships. He acknowledges that Sukarno in fact created a cult of personality which diminished his role as leader and voice of the mass movement of the people.

          I disagree with Max Lane’s interpretation, believing that it tends to under estimate the potential of the role of the working class, and particularly the industrial working class in Indonesia and its future. As I argued in my book Made in Indonesia: Indonesian Workers Since Suharto. (Boston: South End Press, 2001), which covers much of the same ground as Lane’s, workers, unions, and working class politics have a potential to play a leadership role in Indonesia. In my view, Lane’s “people,” made up as they are of peasants, rural laborers, industrial workers, artisans, self-employed petty merchants and vendors, are too diverse to provide a coherent class base or political program for Indonesian society. In Indonesia and other countries in the developing world such populist masses tend to be dominated by a charismatic leader or sometimes by the state or by a state-party. The alternative is the development of a primarily working class party with clear objectives which can give leadership to the diverse masses of the society. The question, as Lane would agree, I think, is that the unfinished national revolution must be transformed into a socialist revolution. Lane’s people’s revolution appears to me to put an obstacle in that path, that is in making the step from nationalist to workers’ revolution, because it is precisely the people conceived in this populist way who historically form the social basis for nationalist revolutions which then institutionalize into obstacles to socialism.

          Setting aside for the moment Lane’s interpretation, I regret to say that I feel that he has not succeeded in telling the story in a way that will be accessible to most readers. Though Lane understands the history, culture and politics, perhaps better than any other non-Indonesian, he does not always succeed in weaving the strands together in way that will be understandable to readers who are unfamiliar with that terrain. Beginning as it does in the post-1965 period, Lane’s book does not discuss even briefly the history of Dutch and Japanese imperialism which led to the emergence of the modern nationalist movement, while his extended discussion of Sukarno and his role in the nationalist movement comes unfortunately only towards the end of the book.

          Lane’s interesting early chapter on Toer and Rendra, their role as public intellectuals of the left, and the relationship between the nationalist movement and culture suggests that these ideas will form a central argument of the book. Yet we lose the thread of that cultural argument in long descriptions of the actions of the contemporary (1990s to 2000s) radical movement, and occasionally narrative gives way to chronology as developments are followed in a level of detail in which the most important events and the author’s sense of the significance of these events may be lost. Lane also uses a number of Indonesian words to give us the flavor of the culture, but, as the foreign terms multiply, and as he introduces dozens of NGOs and political party initials, the reader can be overwhelmed by the detail.

          Yet, despite those literary issues and my own disagreement with the political interpretation of Indonesian history and politics, Lane’s book offers the best narrative we have of the popular movements that overthrew Suharto and the fullest and most coherent description of the role of the PRD. Those who want to know that history will find the book very worthwhile. I remain, despite our differences, a great admirer of Max Lane, both for his wonderful translations and for undertaking to tell his version of this story.

  • The Need to Say NO

    [This review appeared in New Politics, vol. I, no. 4, summer 1962 (old series).]

    As a novelist, a middle class man of the mid-century, a Jew and a socialist, Harvey Swados is that wonderful rarity in the United States today, a committed human being. His recently published collection of essays written over the last ten years, A Radical’s America,* reveals his deep sense of disturbance about the quality of contemporary American life, its cant and corruption.

         Unwilling to accept the latest wrinkle in sociological interpretations of the manners and mores of the American working class, Swados has written a number of essays on the nature of work, exploitation, leisure and cultural backwardness which do an enormous amount to destroy the Madison Avenue image of the American worker as a member of the middle class. “But there is one thing that the worker doesn’t do like the middle class: he works like a worker,” Mr. Swados writes in an essay entitled “The Myth of the Happy Worker.” “The steelmill puddler does not yet sort memos, the coal miner does not yet sit in conferences, the cotton mill-hand does not yet sip martinis from his lunch-box. The worker’s attitude toward his work is generally compounded of hatred, shame and resignation.”

         In “Labor’s Cultural Degradation” he gives voice to the complaint that it is the man at the bottom of the heap, the man who does the dirty work, who is the particularly exploited victim of the mass media, not given an honest possibility of developing an individual taste for individual works of the human imagination, not having the range of cultural choice available to members of the middle class. “I for one think that the working class-regardless of whether it is envied by other proletarians who would like to drive cars instead of riding bicycles, or would like to ride bicycles instead of walking—is being cheated, swindled, and degraded as ferociously as ever its English counterparts were a century ago when Marx and Engels were anatomizing them. The fact that it may not be aware of its exploitation does not alter the reality of its situation.”

         The very nature of work, its boredom, frustration, lack of personal fulfillment is probed in the essay “Work as a Public Issue” in which questions are raised about the possibility of those working in factories, participating in decision making affecting their own working lives; the decentralization of productive facilities to the point where their management can be at least partially controlled by the workers themselves. If he has no definitive answers to many of the problems he raises, his suggestion that “the meaning of work be brought forth from the philosopher’s study and placed where it belongs—in the political arena—as a public issue” is both valid and welcome.

         Harvey Swados’ concerns encompass Jewishness and alienation in “Certain Jewish Writers,” the plight of the contemporary American woman in “The Dilemma of the Educated Woman,” the special problems of the young in “Work and the Professions,” “Popular Taste and the Agonies of the Young,” and “Why Resign from the Human Race?”

         Lest we forget, he reminds us of the misery of the unemployed in “The Miners: Men Without Work” and the acute problems faced by striking workers and their unions in “The Myth of the Powerful Worker.”

         These are not the writing of a detached, objective onlooker. A Radical’s America is a passionate indictment of contemporary values by an intellectual who is an active participant in American life, who holds that “a socialist attitude is at least as firmly in the American grain as a liberal or an absolutist stance” and who clearly differentiates himself form those intellectuals drawn to the Washington orbit, as well as those drawn to Moscow, or more recently, Belgrade, Peking or Havana.

         The essays are required reading for the young and idealistic, for the old and disenchanted. They offer evidence “that those of us who persist in saying No to a society built on worship of the buck for the things and people it an buy, those of us who persist in dreaming of a society built on mutual respect, have just as much right to consider ourselves as representative of an essential corpuscular element in the American bloodstream as do the Luces, the Nixons, the Kennedys, and all those who, in appropriating for themselves even the rhetoric of our common dream have turned it into a nightmare.” For Harvey Swados, that dream still holds a large measure of enchantment.

    * A RADICAL’S AMERICA by Harvey Swados, Little, Brown and Company, 1962, 437 pp., $5.00.

  • Does "union democracy" undermine "solidarity?"

    [We have asked labor activists to respond to "Card Check: Labor's Charlie Brown Moment?" by Robert Fitch, to encourage discussion on the important issues raised in the article. What follows is the response of Herman Benson.]

     Whenever an intractable phenomenon resists explanation, curious systems are offered as answers. Humanity's mysterious place in the universe gives rise to some puzzling religions; the left's need to find a satisfactory place for the labor movement in society comes at one of those times. And so, Bob Fitch's provocative journey through history, philosophy, and janitors' wages should prompt a wide range of comment. In the course of all this, he seems to suggest what we might actually do, I'd like to summarize what seems to be the crux of what he proposes:
    Because the labor movement, doing the same thing over and again like Charlie Brown, he says, it has failed to live up to our expectations and is not reformable, we must work to create a new, what he calls, solidarity labor movement. By his standards it would appear, the left, aiming at labor reform, seems to be another Charlie Brown, futilely doing the same thing over and over; and so it needs to do something new. These two objectives are inextricably interlinked. The left, he seems to say, will rejuvenate itself only when, following his call for a new solidarity labor movement, it abandons the hope of changing this mortally defective labor movement and goes out to build that new solidarity movement.
    Now, from his point of view, just what is the essential defect of what calls itself a labor movement today? It represents, he says, a minority that is interested only in itself; it is a special interest group that makes gains at the expense of the working class. Yes, he sometimes admits (but not always,) there is a "union premium" but it is won by sacrificing the interests of the mass of workers. So far, he must realize, this is precisely the basic philosophical argument of extreme right wing apologists who insist that unionism itself is a parasitic growth upon society. Fitch expands the scope of that argument leftward. To that basic defect, he attributes all the other myriad ills: corruption, authoritarianism, decline of unionization under the impact of competition, and what not, adding that well-meaning progressives who enter the cesspool of that special-interest unionism, hoping to reform it, are bound to become corrupt themselves.
    And so he wants a new labor movement that advances the broad interests of the class not the narrow, self-serving, special interest minority. The idea is not new; no question that it can be a seductive idea; it has been attractive enough to entice a whole cadre of left-leaning union activists, community organizers, and civil rights advocates to support the Andy Stern-Steve Lerner vision of a new labor movement. Calling for a union that strives for "Justice for All" and not "Justice for Us," they accuse Sal Rosselli of defending the "narrow " interests of his own members at the expense of those exploited workers on the outside.
    A policy-program of action based upon a presumably profound conflict between the interests of the working class and the interests of its organized minority gets us nowhere. Unions organize first where workers are best situated to win their battle. As they raise the standards of those who are victorious, they tend to lift the standards of the class, even those not organized. The "union premium" surely means that unions will always face competitive danger from non-union employers and not always successfully. I don't quite understand how Fitch's solidarity unionism, even in theory, solves that problem. When a few hundred UE workers win severance pay by temporarily occupying a factory whose owners benefit from the bailout, that seems for him one example of the new solidarity unionism. If the SEIU wins a pay boost for several thousand New York janitors, that, we must presume, is the old style bankrupt unionism in action. But in each case, where did the rest of the working class fit in? My guess is that he feels that the UE has contributed to creating "a national-popular will." Translate that into less mystical language: he likes the rhetoric, it's better propaganda. I don't want to denigrate rhetoric and propaganda. But is that the new way to a new labor movement? What else has the left been doing all these years? In general, Fitch faces reality with abstract rhetoric. He makes me think of an incident in Frank Schonfeld's early battle against racketeers in the Painters union in New York, A dozen of his caucus members were parceling out assignments in their election campaign. "You pass out handbills at the Local xx meeting; you at Local xxxx; you at the Bronx big job site; we all go to the pensioners meeting; etc etc." One advanced thinker got impatient, "We're wasting our time. What we have to do is organize the workers in struggle."
    Workers join unions for higher wages, better conditions on the job, security.(A platitude? I think this simplistic truism belongs in this discussion of deep stuff!) Union leadership, in the name of noble objectives like "collective will formation" or solidarity unionism (or justice for all, or sweetheart deals with employers and politicians, or simple swindling), surely can downgrade these mundane pursuits. But in order to keep these "special interest" impulses under control, the leaders invent all kinds of bureaucratic and autocratic devices. That is, they undermine union democracy, which is precisely what explains the course of those well-meaning Stern zealots. And which is precisely where Fitch's theories would lead us, assuming anyone would try to implement them. Does that seems a stretch? Unfair? Think of where his convoluted thinking has led him:
    Like the Stern ideologists, he derogates "union democracy.," (Watch those familiar demeaning quote marks." Here is one example of how he takes flight from reality into the world of abstraction where he is more comfortable. We, at the Association for Union Democracy for example, campaign for certain specific rights for members in their unions to free speech, fair elections, due process, fair job referrals systems , etc. (How successful? We can argue about that.) He finds that "troubling" because all "union democracy" does is to give workers the opportunity of pursuing their own narrow interests as against the interests of the class. If you didn't get it from a quick reading of his piece, it's because he embellishes his notions with the dizzying trappings of philosophical speculation. He finds the advocacy of "union democracy" "troubling" because under that concept "the vital distinction between the mechanical and organic forms of solidarity disappears. And what's promoted is a kind of Smithian view of the labor movement in which the welfare of all is advanced by the democratic participatory strivings of members in each local union aiming strictly at its own welfare." Get it? Translate that into manageable English: Give rights to those narrow-minded workers, and they'll use it for their own selfish interests. Every condescending savior of the working class would agree. It's not a new idea. It is what propels the Stern-ideologists drive for a newly centralized, authoritarian labor movement which puts power into the hands of a know-it-all officialdom in the name of their version of solidarity.
    Those who would help solve labor's problems by moving toward a highly centralized, authoritarian structure want to put an end to the rights of members in their locals. The Carpenters, for example, by turning locals into impotent administrative shells. The SEIU Sternites by merging locals into huge mega structures where it becomes extraordinarily difficult for any opposition independent of the establishment to take form.
    Fitch's idealized brand of unionism leads him in precisely the same direction. Local autonomy does not fit in comfortably with his notion of solidarity. As he puts it — a leftist slant to an authoritarian idea —" Subdividing American labor into 20,000 semi-autonomous locals … subdivides the possibility of solidarity. Each local has its own contract, its own local grievances —it remains a tidy, microcosm, self-sufficient to itself."
    Fitch, I am sure, believes all that stuff — in his head. But in his heart? I wonder, because I know he is a fine fellow. And so, let's submit him to a simple test: Fitch is about to enter a store only to confront an IWW picket line of workers who are on strike to demand a $5 increase for seven Starbucks employees as part of the IWW eternal struggle to liberate workers of the world united. Will he respect that line? Of course! But let's say he meets a strike picket line brandishing labor banners protesting against the hiring of Muslims, would he respect that line? Of course not! These are workers fighting in their own narrow special interests. In the name of solidarity, he would never betray the cause of racial equality.
    But let's say the picket line sought an increase in the wages of 100 members of one of those special-interest unions, one which he would replace because it seeks to gain at the expense of the working class. Would he respect it? I think he surely would, even though, according to his theory, he would seem to betray the requirements of class solidarity. Something must be wrong with his theory. Still, there is a seductive element of truth in everything he writes. As Walter Reuther would say — repeated over and again by Victor — we can't be satisfied with a nickel-in the-pay-envelope unionism. Those on the left — and dedicated activists, and intellectuals, and students — who direct their time and energies and emotions and sometimes their lives to unions, do so because they are convinced that the labor movement can serve as a transforming force for social justice. It can be frustrating to see how far short unions can fall from that end, and it can be disappointing to see them preoccupied with the "narrow" interests of their own members and deaf to leftist appeals for broader solidarity.
    But we must remember this: Because unions arise out of the basic need of its worker-members for higher wages, security, better working conditions, the labor movement — even as a minority of the working class — acquires a stability, a long-range endurance, a continuity that distinguishes it from other social movements and from the multitude of charities and worthy causes that hope to serve ailing humanity. The left builds upon that quality of endurance; it is that quality that makes the union movement so powerful a potential force for social justice. But Fitch bases his philosophy upon the presumed antagonism between the simple drive of one group of workers to better its lot and the needs of his solidarity unionism.
    The evils of corruption, and authoritarianism, and the dangers to democracy in the labor movement do not arise out of the lack of class struggle policies or, as Fitch might put it, from a shortage of solidarity. These problems transcend social and political line. All those class struggle unions he so nostalgically admires, those created in the thirties by the radical founding fathers, seem to have evolved into the kind of unionism he rejects. If we could start all over again in perfect virtue, what reason to believe that we would end anywhere else?
    Full disclosure: Here, briefly, is what I believe. The labor movement today, with all the defects that Bob catalogues once again, falls far short of what we want. But I believe it has been inching slowly, painfully, inconsistently, in the right direction. In large part that movement has been impelled by the work of union democrats, leftists, and dissidents —like TDU, Labor Notes, and reform caucuses that come and go — with the help of federal law on union democracy. I mention this with some diffidence only because it may provide Bob, in his rebuttals, with the opportunity to tell us again at length how degenerated he finds the labor movement and how far it falls short of his ideal, maybe even worse than ever. But, Bob, you have succeeded in convincing us of the evils that exist. You insist that what we are doing do is futile. Enough of that. Now tell us how you propose that the reoriented left is build the new labor movement and how it is to create the constituency in and around the labor movement, as it exists, to campaign for the new labor movement, one that exists now only in your heart's desire.
    There is a real problem in the labor movement today. We do need strong national unions armed with the authority and power to deal with centralized capital. Using that need as a pretext, one dangerous tendency in the labor movement would seek that power by turning locals into impotent administrative shells. Another would transform locals into uncontrollable monstrosities. The requirement for central authority in unions (aka, solidarity) must be mitigated by a vigorous union democracy. Just at a time when union activists on the left — and right and center — must emphasize union democracy as a means of strengthening union power, Fitch, in the name of solidarity, derogates "union democracy" and the efforts of those who campaign for it.
    To sum up again what seems his program for reviving the left: Replace what he sees as a degenerated labor movement, a special-interest institution that promotes the narrow privileges of its members at the expense of the working class, by creating a new labor movement which represents the whole class. Toward that end, he would work for the end of maintenance of membership requirements and for an end to exclusive bargaining rights. As a platform, it is a left wing recipe for suicide; but it does have one redeeming feature: no one will have to suffer the consequences because it will never happen. We all may talk about it, but no one will ever do it. The downside is that the consolation of talking may relieve us of the burden of doing anything.

  • Open Letter of Solidarity with Egyptian Workers from the Campaign for Peace and Democracy, April 30, 2020

    We are writing to extend our heartfelt solidarity and support to you, Egyptian workers, who in recent months have been courageously demanding that your government address your desperate economic conditions. The American press has been shamefully muted about the grim economic and political realities of life for people in Egypt, a key strategic U.S. ally in the Middle East. But in an eye-opening article in The New York Times of April 28, 2010, “Labor Protests Test Egypt’s Government,” by Michael Slackman, the curtain was lifted, for a moment at least. The article says,

    CAIRO — Day after day, hundreds of workers from all over Egypt have staged demonstrations and sit-ins outside Parliament, turning sidewalks in the heart of the capital into makeshift camps and confounding government efforts to bring an end to the protests.

       Nearly every day since February, protesters have chanted demands outside Parliament during daylight and laid out bedrolls along the pavement at night. The government and its allies have been unable to silence the workers, who are angry about a range of issues, including low salaries.

       Using an emergency law that allows arrest without charge and restricts the ability to organize, the Egyptian government and the ruling National Democratic Party have for decades blocked development of an effective opposition while monopolizing the levers of power. The open question — one that analysts say the government fears — is whether the workers will connect their economic woes with virtual one-party rule and organize into a political force.

       This week, with blankets stacked neatly behind them, at least four different groups were banging pots, pans and empty bottles and chanting slogans. There were factory workers, government workers, employees of a telephone company and handicapped men and women. The group of handicapped people said they had been there for 47 days, demanding jobs and housing….

       The government has tried to define workers’ complaints as pocketbook issues, analysts said, hoping that if specific demands are met, workers will disband without blaming those in charge and without adding political change to their list of priorities.

       Try as the Egyptian government might to define your complaints as simply narrow “pocketbook issues,” divorced from democratic rights to protest, assemble, and assert labor’s interests in the political arena, the distinction won’t hold. They are inextricably linked, and this is true today in Egypt, Iran, China, the Philippines and everywhere else. Egyptian workers must have the right to freely assemble, protest and strike, and to form independent trade unions and political parties.

       As Americans, we repudiate the hypocritical policy of the United States, our own government, which turns a blind eye to human rights abuses on the part of its allies, such as Egypt, while decrying such transgressions by governments that defy U.S. power. The Campaign for Peace and Democracy firmly believes that a just and peaceful world must be based on respect for human rights.

       We salute you in your brave struggle. We understand that the Mubarak government, which heads a de facto one-party state, is contemplating a crackdown on labor protesters. We will do all in our power to mobilize here in the United States and in countries around the world to prevent this from happening.

    In peace and solidarity,
    Joanne Landy and Thomas Harrison
    Co-Directors, Campaign for Peace and Democracy
    New York City
    Web: www.cpdweb.org Email: cpd@igc.org

  • Los Suns

    It's not unprecedented for athletes here to object to racist policies, military invasions, and various other crimes and stupidities.

       The raised, gloved fists of Tommie Smith and John Carlos on the podium at the 1968 Olympics provide the most dramatic and public example of athletes taking a public stand against oppression. For their courage, Smith and Carlos were demonized and hustled out of town by the U.S. Olympic Committee, though today they are celebrated, at least in some circles.

       Muhammad Ali gave up several years of his career in the ring and risked prison when he refused induction during the Viet Nam War.

       Mahhoud Abdul-Rauf, late of the Denver Nuggets, brought down a rain of boos on his head for electing not to stand during the singing of the national anthem before basketball games.

       More recently, we have become accustomed to the Michael Jordan theory of avoiding controversial positions. Asked why he would not support a Democrat, Jordan allegedly replied, "Republicans buy sneakers, too."

       So it's encouraging to see Steve Nash of the Phoenix Suns object to the new law in Arizona, and encouraging also, as well as surprising, to see the owner of the team dress his players in uniforms that read "Los Suns." (One wonders why not "Los Sols," but perhaps that would have been too much to expect.) Major League Baseball's players' union has also objected to the law, although the union's contention that Latino players coming into Phoenix to play the Diamondbacks might have cause to worry about their own safety seems a little forced. Wealthy ballplayers are unlikely to be victims of profiling, but good for the union for their sense of solidarity.

       It will be interesting to see whether Major League Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig will pay any attention to those who've urged him to pull the 2011 All-Star Game out of Phoenix. If he does, I hope he'll refer to those most likely to be persecuted under the new law as "undocumented" rather than "illegal," though that, too, might be too much to expect.

  • Phyllis Jacobson, 1922-2010

    The editorial board of New Politics is very sad to report the death of Phyllis Jacobson, co-founder and long-time co-editor of the journal. Phyllis died on March 2, 2010, after suffering a devastating stroke close to ten years ago. We are deeply indebted to Phyllis and her late husband Julie for tirelessly holding high the banner of radical, democratic socialism and independent politics. 

         The Jacobsons did not want an editorial board of clones. They welcomed board members from a range of left perspectives that supported the basic orientation of New Politics: standing "in opposition to all forms of imperialism," "uncompromising in its defense of feminism and affirmative action," and above all insisting "on the centrality of democracy to socialism and on the need to rely on mass movements from below for progressive social transformation." We are proud to have worked with Phyllis in this ongoing struggle.

      PJacobson pic1   For over a half-century Phyllis was an indefatigable fighter against injustice, an anchor for those of us committed to independent socialism. Her brilliance, her dynamism, her determination have given independent socialists hope. She continues to inspire us today.

         We collect below some memories and thoughts about Phyllis. If others would like to add to this collection, please write us at newpoliticsjournal@gmail.com.

    — Joanne Landy and Stephen R. Shalom for the New Politics editorial board

    Phyllis

     

    Some New Politics articles by Phyllis Jacobson

  • For Phyllis Jacobson, A Comrade

    Those of us who knew Phyllis Jacobson and her husband Julie will realize that her death brings to a close a long and rich chapter in the history of the revolutionary and democratic socialist left in the US. She was the last of a small but heroic generation. Starting with the YPSL Fourth International, the youth section of the Socialist Party that split under Trotskyist leadership to set up the Socialist Workers Party in 1938 she and Julie ended up in the Workers Party (later the Independent Socialist League) when it was formed in 1940. She and most WPers, followers of a then still revolutionary socialist Max Shachtman, spent the years of the Second World War working "in industry," trying to radicalize the fast growing Labor movement. After the war Julie and she founded the anti-war Third Camp socialist journal ANVIL, which was directed at students and which had a circulation in many thousands . I remember we sold more than 1,000 at City College alone in 1951, and it was a big item on the slowly growing student left in Berkeley, Chicago, Brooklyn and other centers of student activism against the Korean war. It was at ANVIL editorial board meetings in their Greenwich Village apartment that we first met.

         The Jacobsons remained active when the ISL and ANVIL ended up in the Socialist Party in 1957. In the Party she (and I) remained "hard left" third camp anti-war socialists. When the Party split in 1970 and DSOC (later DSA) were founded we lost regular personal touch, but we remained in contact through New Politics, which was and remained the premier Third Camp, anti-Stalinist independent socialist journal in the US, perhaps the English-speaking world.

         In her last years she was very ill. Her life companion Julie died leaving her to cope with almost complete paralysis. Her son, Michael and daughter-in-law Lynn remained political and active in DSA. She will be missed as a brave link to a revolutionary democratic socialist past which must not be forgotten.

    Bogdan Denitch
    Honorary Chair DSA, one of the founders of YSL, DSOC and DSA

  • Condolence Statement

    We would like to send our condolences to the family, friends and comrades of Phyllis Jacobson. As a founding editor of New Politics, Phyllis played a crucial role in advocating the core principles of "socialism from below," including opposition to Stalinism and support for independent working-class political action. Her commitment to internationalism and solidarity was genuine and heartfelt. Without any hesitation, she opened the pages of New Politics to us when we organized campaigns to defend socialists in Greece and South Korea who faced government persecution. Phyllis helped to educate many generations of socialists. Today's socialists will pay their respects by carrying on the cause to which Phyllis devoted her life.

    International Socialist Organization

  • Good Bye, Phyllis

    I met Phyllis and Julie in September of 1961. I had just graduated from the University of Chicago where I had joined the YPSL, and was passing through New York on my way to London. I met them at Julie’s machine shop in Great Jones Street in the East Village and they took me out for lunch at the corner diner on Lafayette and Great Jones. There they told me that the first issue of New Politics had just come out, and as the good and experienced organizers they were, they immediately enrolled me as their London distributor. For the two years I lived in that city I duly and enthusiastically distributed a sizable bundle every quarter — with the help of a British comrade who had a car — to some eight or ten major bookstores in the metropolitan area.

       As a young student who had just begun to get a political education, I read practically every single article and book review that New Politics published in the sixties, and continued to do so as I became a politically mature person in later decades. For its first few years, New Politics published an article by Hal Draper in each of its issues; these articles along with "The Two Souls of Socialism," also published in the journal, became the foundation stone of my Socialism from Below politics. It was New Politics that introduced me to American labor. The articles by the labor attorney Burton Hall on the legal aspects of union democracy, Herbert Hill on racism in the unions, and Stan Weir and Steve Zeluck on the fight for union democracy in the ILWU and AFT became the main foundations of my understanding of American labor at a time when the postwar boom was coming to an end. It was also through New Politics that I began to acquire an understanding of the nature of the Soviet bloc, and became exposed to the critical issues facing the black and women’s movement.

       From the beginning it was evident that Phyllis played a central and indispensable role in the journal both as an excellent editor with a sharp eye for academic and sectarian nonsense, throat clearing and other writing vices, and as a contributor on her own right. Like Julie, she was a child of the now extinct Jewish blue-collar working class — Phyllis’ father was a waiter at Ratner’s for many years, and like Julie, she was among the rapidly diminishing number of self-taught public intellectuals who never held an academic position whether as a professor or as a professional researcher. I am convinced that many of Phyllis’ strengths as a writer and as an editor were rooted in her having been untouched by the academic world.

       In 1983, Selma and I moved to Brooklyn a couple of blocks from the Jacobson’s magnificent brownstone on Clinton Street. This introduced a whole new element into my relationship with them. I got to know them as people and as neighbors. Shortly after we moved into the neighborhood, Bell and Howell, the corporation that had bought Julie’s machine shop and retained him as a manager, shut down the business “deindustrializing” Julie and his workers (who had become unionized after Julie brought the UAW into the shop). He and Phyllis, who had also stopped working full time for pay as an editorial assistant, began to alternate between spending several months editing New Politics and spending the rest of the year in southern Europe. Phyllis helped to pay their way there by working as a part-time travel agent (we were among her clients). As friends and neighbors, Phyllis and Julie would give us advice about wine and restaurants, house painters and contractors, and gave us shelter when our boiler shut down in the middle of a terrible snow storm. We in turn tried to be as helpful neighbors as possible and kept an eye on their house, which to us was like a museum, and their garden while they were away in Europe. They had only a flimsy lock on their entrance door and we worried that during our watch the house would be burglarized and all their collected treasures would vanish from one day to the other. As we were in the process of selling our house to move to Manhattan, we were surprised and amused by Phyllis’ frantic reaction to the news that a political person she particularly disliked had come to see our house as a potential buyer. Fortunately for her, there was no second visit, much less any purchase offers. Years later, when we used to visit Phyllis in the nursing home, I would go over that and other stories and always got her reaction: a smile and a raised finger like she used to do in a previous time when making one of her incisive comments. That’s how I knew she and I were connecting.

       Goodbye Phyllis. It has been a real privilege to be your comrade, friend, neighbor.

    Samuel Farber
    March 22, 2010